The highly recommended new version of Doctor Who premieres tonight on the SciFi Channel.

MEANWHILE IN PRINTLAND, I’ll have a couple of big announcements next week about a current produce future project. Until then, let’s get caught up with some of the new paper periodicals showing up around town.

Even as the daily-newspaper biz is wreaked by decline and consolidation, slick magazines are suddenly finding financial backing. At one time, almost nobody even tried to charge money for a local mag (except Seattle and Washington CEO). Now there are two new entrants this month alone.

First out of the gate: Seattle Metropolitan. It’s from the pubilshers of Portland Monthly, staffed largely by Seattle Weekly refugees, and promises to be out every damned month.

The premiere issue’s splashy enough, but a bit weak in the enthrallment department.

There’s a laughingly awful “return to elegance” fashion spread, a predictable Charles Cross essay about Beatles nostalgia, and a drab cover hyping a list of the “65 Best Ways to Love Our City.” (I normally like pieces like this, but this one seemed off a bit. Too staid.)

On the plus side, there’s a poignant MIchael Dougan cartoon depicting the spirit of Seattle as a female rock singer who became “America’s darling” at the cost of her soul. And a long but sprightly piece depicts the devolution of Bruce Chapman from political progressive to religious-right demagogue-for-hire.

Yet, for its misses, Seattle Met at least tries to be about something. Its reach exceeds its current grasp, but that’s good.

And that’s more than can usually be said about today’s Seattle magazine, which usually settles for such formula product as “the (insert number here) top (insert upscale profession here) in (insert name of city here).” Seattle recently celebrated what it claimed to be its 40th anniversary. That’s a little specious and a lot convoluted. Let’s try to delineate:

• In 1966, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt helped start Pacific Search, a regional environmental/outdoors newsletter. (Bullitt had also subsidized the first Seattle magazine, which ran from 1964 to 1970.)
• Pacific Search evolved over the years into Pacific Northwest, a slick upscale-lifestyles magazine covering a region defined broadly enough to include large swaths of northern California. Pacific Northwest never really gelled as either an editorial or an ad-sales concept, and stumbled along through the ’80s.
• The Pacific Northwest subscriber list was eventually taken over by a new venture, Seattle Home & Garden. Circa 1993, that was split into two mags, Northwest Home & Garden and the new Seattle. This mini-empire’s now part of the Minnesota-based Tiger Oak Publications.

The above is a brief recap of a complex print-family tree; I ask your advance forgiveness for missing a vital detail here or there. Even in this short form, it’s a more intriguing story than most of what Seattle has run lately.

I’ve got this theory about compelling media content: You’ve gotta have some. It’s not enough anymore to simply identify a wealthy segment of the populace, proclaim yourself to be that segment’s “voice,” and watch the ad bucks roll in. You’ve gotta make readers want you and keep wanting you, despite the plethora of other local and national media choices out there.

Seattle Met, for all its initial failings, gets this. Will Seattle learn it in response? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Elsewhere in the same city, Seattle (Sound) breaks all the rules of local music media established back in the late ’70s by the late, lamented Rocket. Seattle (Sound) is a slick mag, not a newsprint tabloid. It charges a cover price. Because it only comes out every two months, it can’t even pretend to offer complete club listings. It doesn’t devote its cover to an out-of-town superstar act. It includes all genres, from rock to rap to classical.

And it works.

The mag’s presence alone is one big statement to the world: Seattle music’s still here dammit, and it’s stronger and broader than ever.

It treats the entire combined local music sub-scenes as one big community. It dares to define its niche big yet specific–as everyone who’s even peripherally involved with local music of any kind, as a player, a listener, or a behind-the-scenes support person.

Its debut cover story’s another list piece (“Seattle Music: 50 Most Influential”). But, unlike Seattle Met‘s big list piece, Seattle (Sound)‘s list is coherent and consistent, even as it darts from the Seattle Opera to Barsuk Records to up-n’-coming production wizards.

There are a few weak spots in the first issue. (KEXP’s John Richards has remarkably little to say about the local hiphop scene.) But on the whole it’s a great intro to a great new concept. Kudos to everyone at Media Index Publishing Group (publishers of Media Inc., the essential trade mag for the Northwest’s still-struggling audio-visual and ad-production industries).

(Full disclosure: The back page of Seattle (Sound) contains a short, favorable review of a compilation CD I helped curate. More about that next week.)